Posts in the History Category

I sat digging through the map built by GrandPerspective, showing me what was chewing up 720GB of my 750GB SSD. I already knew my iPhoto Library was the main culprit, consuming just over a third of the total volume, but surely there were other places I was wasting space. And there were: old software installers, virtual machines I had long since ceased to need, movies I’d ripped for watching on trips and never gotten around to dumping afterward, years-old Keynote files that I’d never gotten around to compressing. I dealt with the most obvious offenders, one way or another, and then rescanned the volume.

A set of blocks popped up near the middle of the new map, a cluster I’d not noticed before, even though they were clearly somewhat sizable. I moused over to see what they were.

They were CD-R master images.

Images of my daughter’s medical records.

Of her MRIs.

Somewhere in there, her final brain scans, the ones where the doctors did not even bother to count the emerging tumors, there were so many.

There’s enough data in there to recreate 3D models of her brain as it turned on itself. Enough to reconstruct the cartography of her death.

I should just delete it. Keeping the information is pointless now, when it cannot save her, a reminder of futility and helplessness. It’s worse than useless—because if a treatment is one day discovered, the data in these files could torture us with the certainty that her life could have been saved, if only it had started later. Better to not know, and eke out an existence in the spare shelter of ignorance.

I’m not sure I can delete it. No matter how horrifying the images and records might fundamentally be, they feel like pieces of her, tiny bits of her life and death. That erasure of data would feel like an erasure of history. Like a betrayal. Even to shunt them from my primary machine to some sort of backup storage would feel the same as I did when we carefully packed all of her favorite toys and kindergarten drawings into a box, and stored it away, out of sight but never out of perception.

Perhaps I might feel differently if I hadn’t been missing her so keenly the past few weeks. There doesn’t seem to be a specific reason for this, unless it’s the beginning of this specific school year. We’ve all been feeling it, in our own ways. A few days ago, in the middle of a weekend afternoon, the family was at home and just being a family when I suddenly felt her absence like a spiky, sickly, impossible hole in the center of the world. It was as sharp and present as the rush of first love, very nearly tangible and visible.

I look at these files, knowing that there are no rational reasons to keep them and many reasons—rational or otherwise—to let them go. I envision erasing them, and I can’t. All these jagged bits of the past, which do not cling to me; rather, I cling to them, senselessly, hopelessly, afraid to look at them but afraid to let go. Perhaps I believe that with enough of these tiny memories, these shards of her life and death, I can cobble together a wall that will shut out the void her absence tore open.

It was right about now, exactly two decades ago, that I pulled on my Tom Servo “I’M HUGE” T-shirt and strolled from my apartment over to Strosacker Auditorium for the CWRU Film Society’s screening of MST3K: The Movie. I’d gotten the evening off from my tech crew duties on Schoolhouse Rock Live! at the Beck Center so that I could catch the movie in a theater again, having been one of the few who’d seen it during its initial theatrical run. To say I was looking forward to it was an understatement. I’d been a fan ever since my high school best friend, Dave, had introduced me to it with a VHS copy of the “Rocketship X-M” episode. The first HTML document I ever marked up was a copy of the MST3K Episode Guide I’d found on Usenet.

I was a staff member of the Film Society, as well as of the university—at that point I was just over a couple of years into being the campus Webmaster and, more or less coincidentally, not quite a couple of years into being divorced. The Film Society was a fun way to pass weekend nights in good company, contribute to a collective effort, and get to see a bunch of movies. So when I pushed through the glass lobby doors, I looked around to see what needed to be done. The ticket counter was already staffed by a couple of people, neither of whom I’d ever seen before. Which was to be expected, a month into the fall semester. We always picked up a few new members as incoming students got adjusted to campus life and looked for stuff to do. I clearly remember one of them, a laughing girl with short-ish curly hair and a unique clothing style.

I remember because later that evening, after I’d seen the movie and was manning the concession stand for one of the later shows, she wandered over to see if I needed any help, then stayed to flirt. For once in my life, I smoothly responded in kind. We kept up the good-natured banter throughout the evening, peppering it with sharp looks and sardonic grins. As things were winding down on the last show, just as I was opening my mouth to ask her if she’d like me to walk her home, she asked me if I’d like to walk her home.

And that’s how Kat and I met, twenty years ago tonight.

Anyone who knew either of us well would never have pegged the other as a likely match. She wasn’t even an MST3K fan: she’d come to Film Society that night, a month into her graduate school studies, to join up and thus have a group to hang out with, and hadn’t even really looked at the schedule first. We had wildly different tastes in music, art, food, recreation, even basic relationship expectations. And yet, somehow, one way or another, with a lot of work and a lot of luck, it’s worked out.

In the time since, we’ve had experiences more amazing and suffered more deeply than either of us could have imagined, as we traded tidbits of information and innuendo over an array of candy bars that balmy September evening. We’ve each shown strength neither of us would have imagined in ourselves. I think we also bring out the best in each other, and that too is a kind of strength.

Two decades. Hard to believe, sometimes, but we did it…and, as Crow might say, I’d do it again if I had to.

The Web is celebrating its 25th anniversary today, taking as its starting point the March 1989 publication of “Information Management: A Proposal”. I was honored to contribute a small greeting to the Greetings page over at The Web At 25. Following on that, I wanted to add a few more words here, mostly about my own Web history, because the Web is nothing if not a vast collection of all of us sharing ourselves.

I was first exposed to the Web in mid- to late 1993 by my friend and (then) co-worker, Jim Nauer, and it instantly caught my imagination. I’d worked on some hypertext systems before, including a summer spent on a DOS-based hypertext system whose name now escapes me that was used to mark up the Ohio Legal Code on CD-ROM for a publisher named Banks-Baldwin, now a division of Thomson Reuters. This Web thing, though, this was something altogether different and more powerful. By late fall I’d gotten my hands on a paper copy of the HTML 2.0 specification and on December 3th, 1993, I finished marking up my first document: the Incomplete Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide.

At the time, I was a hardware jockey for the Library Information Technologies department at Case Western Reserve University, swapping out bad SIMM chips in online catalog terminals and maintaining a database of equipment serial numbers. So in my downtime between service calls and database updates, I had the freedom to install Mosaic betas and start surfing around to see what there was to be seen. My increasing obsession with the Web eventually led me to become Webmaster of CWRU’s first “pure” Web site. (Before that, there was an HTTP interface to our Gopher server, which was the first www.cwru.edu.) And as part of that, I published tutorials and compatibility charts and spent a lot of time on Usenet and mailing lists dedicated to this new Web thing.

I do remember the moment that the Web blew me away a second time, and it’s a moment of total coincidence, which is of course why I remember it. On April 3rd, 1996, I discovered (I forget exactly how) that CNN had a Web site, and I was astonished—a news network taking the Web seriously? Really? So I loaded it up, and the top headline was “RON BROWN KILLED IN PLANE CRASH” or words to that effect. We turned on a radio, and there was nothing about the crash for at least an hour, maybe more, and of course newspapers wouldn’t have anything to say until morning, and I remember thinking: What is wrong with these other channels, that they’re so slow and unresponsive? That was my first direct glimpse of the future of information velocity, something that permanently altered my instincts.

Over the years, the Web has obviously been good to me, and I’ve tried to be good to it in return. The original Internet aesthetic of sharing what you know and making use of what others share, one that carried onto the early Web, has always resonated with me, as did the obvious simplicity (and thus robustness) of the Web itself. As simple as possible, and no simpler; small pieces loosely joined; openness to all—these are principles I held dear and which the Web has always embodied. Which means that the Web helped me maintain those principles, over these past two decades, by showing that they can and do work.

As I said in my greeting for The Web at 25:

The web is the most human information system we have ever seen and that may ever be, open to anyone with the interest to build something, gargantuan and riotous and everything we are and hope to be. It’s been a privilege just to witness its emergence, let alone play a part in it.

I suppose I could have just posted that here, and skipped the lengthy reminiscing, but what fun would that be?

After a decade-long run, Camino is no longer being developed, and we encourage all users to upgrade to a more modern browser. Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use.

I used Camino for a long time, and only left when it had lagged much too far behind the rest of the browser market. (Camino used Gecko embedding, which was disabled a couple of years ago. That change effectively froze Camino’s rendering engine at the level of Firefox 3.6.)

When I migrated away from Camino, I tried a few alternatives and eventually settled on Firefox because its UI was the least unlike Camino’s. (We like best what we know best.) There were still some things I sorely missed, though, like simple Flash blocking and whitelisting, the multi-row Bookmarks bar, the keyboard bookmark-activation shortcuts, and the truly great downloads manager. If you miss those (or would like to experience them) too, here’s how I got them back in Firefox:

Flashblock — though its UI isn’t quite as easy as Camino’s Flash preferences, Flashblock works well and allows whitelisting.

Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar Plus — the layout of this has gotten a bit wonky under recent Firefox Nightly builds, but still works just fine, and you can even set it to auto-hide itself.

Bookmark Shortcut Keys — built for me in Jetpack by Jeff Balogh, this lets you define which keyboard shortcuts trigger the first nine bookmarks in the Bookmarks bar. I use this all the time, just as I did in Camino. I’ve defined my shortcuts to be ⌘1 through ⌘9, but you can pick whichever modifier keys you like. Thanks, Jeff!

Download Manage Tweak — adds controls to show a file in the OS, delete the file, remove the file from the list without deleting it, and so on. As with Flashblock, it isn’t quite as smooth as Camino’s UI, but it does the same job and a bit more besides.

And one more: New Tab Homepage, which makes certain that Firefox loads your Home page, and not the dashboard, whenever you open a new tab.

So if you still pine a bit for Camino’s UI features, there’s how you can recreate most of the experience in Firefox. If you don’t, then peace be with you, as with the entire Camino team. Thank you all for everything you did to bring OS X a great browser that just felt right.

It was just last week, at the end of April, that CERN announced the rebirth of The Very First URL, in all its responsive and completely presentable glory. If you hit the root level of the server, you get some wonderful information about the Web’s infancy and the extraordinary thing CERN did in releasing it, unencumbered by patent or licensing restrictions, into the world, twenty years ago.

That’s not at all minor point. I don’t believe it overstates the case to say that if CERN hadn’t made the web free and open to all, it wouldn’t have taken over the net. Like previous attempts at hypertext and similar information systems, it would have languished in a niche and eventually withered away. There were other things that had to happen for the web to really take off, but none of them would have mattered without this one simple, foundational decision.

I would go even further and argue that this act infused the web, defining the culture that was built on top of it. Because the medium was free and open, as was often the case in academic and hacker circles before it, the aesthetic of sharing freely became central to the web community. The dynamic of using ideas and resources freely shared by others, and then freely sharing your own resources and ideas in return, was strongly encouraged by the open nature of the web. It was an implicit encouragement, but no less strong for that. As always, the environment shapes those who live within it.

It was in that very spirit that Dave Shea launched the CSS Zen Garden ten years ago this week. After letting it lie fallow for the last few years, Dave has re-opened the site to submissions that make use of all the modern capabilities we have now.

It might be hard to understand this now, but the Zen Garden is one of the defining moments in the history of web design, and is truly critical to understanding the state of CSS before and after it debuted. When histories of web design are written—and there will be—there will be a chapters titled things like “Wired, ESPN, and the Zen Garden: Why CSS Ended Up In Everything”.

Before the Zen Garden, CSS was a thing you used to color text and set fonts, and maybe for a simple design, not for “serious” layout. CSS design is boxy and boring, and impossible to use for anything interesting, went the conventional wisdom. (The Wired and ESPN designs were held to be special cases.) Then Dave opened the gates on the Zen Garden, with its five utterly different designs based on the very same document…and the world turned.

I’m known to be a history buff, and these days a web history buff, so of course I’m super-excited to see both these sites online and actively looked after, but you should be too. You can see where it all started, and where a major shift in design occurred, right from the comfort of your cutting-edge nightly build of the latest and greatest browsers known to man. That’s a rare privilege, and a testimony to what CERN set free, two decades back.

(In television, the “stinger” is the clip that plays during or just after the closing credits of a show.)

On Friday, the Web Standards Project announced its own dissolution. I felt a lot of things upon reading the announcement, once I got over my initial surprise: nostalgia, wistfulness, closure. And over it all, a deep sense of respect for the Project as a whole, from its inception to its peak to its final act.

In some ways, the announcement was a simple formalization of a longstanding state of affairs, as the Project has gradually grown quieter and quieter over the years, and its initiatives had been passed on to other, more active homes. It was still impressive to see the group explicitly shut down. I can’t think of the last time I saw a group that had been so influential and effective recognize that it was time to turn off the lights, and exit with dignity. As they wrote:

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

I have a long history with the WaSP. Way, way back, deep in the thick of the browser wars, I was invited to be a member of the CSS Action Committee, better known as the CSS Samurai. We spent the next couple of years documenting how things worked (or, more often, didn’t) in CSS implementations, and—and this was the clever bit, if you ask me—writing up specific plans of action for browsers. The standards compliance reviews we published told browsers what they needed to fix first, not just what they were getting wrong. I can’t claim that our every word was agreed with, let alone acted upon, but I’m pretty confident those reviews helped push browser teams in the right direction. Or, more likely, helped browser teams push their bosses in the direction the teams already wanted to go.

Succumbing to a wave of nostalgia, I spent a few minutes trawling my archives. I still have what I think is all the mail from the Samurai’s mailing list, run through Project Cool’s servers, from when it was set up in August 1998 up through June of 2000. My archive totals 1,716 messages from the group, as well as some of the Steering Committee members (mostly Glenn Davis, though George Olsen was our primary contact during the Microsoft style sheets patent brouhaha of February 1999). If I’m not reading too much into plain text messages over a decade old, we had a pretty great time. And then, after a while, we were done. Unlike the WaSP itself, we never really declared an end. We didn’t even march off into the sunset having declared that the farmers always win. We just faded away.

Not that that’s entirely a bad thing. At a certain point, our work was done, and we moved on. Still, I look back now and wish we’d made it a little more formal. Had we done so, we might have said something like the WaSP did:

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now…

And so it is. These last years have shown that the job is in very good hands.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” said Margaret Mead. I see now that the way those small groups truly change the world is by convincing the rest of the world that they are right, thus co-opting the world to their cause. Done properly, the change makes the group obsolete. It’s a lesson worth remembering, as we look at the world today.

I’m honored to have been a part of the WaSP, and I offer my deepest samurai bow of respect to its founders, its members, and its leaders. Thank you all for making the web today what it is.

I’ve been a little bit remiss in keeping up with The Web Behind. I think that’s irony? Or maybe it’s just a bummer.

Anyway, the second episode, starring Steve Champeon, was recorded and released last week. Hear about SGML and HTML, progressive enhamcement, the inside and little-known story of the WaSP’s success, and more. I learned at least one thing I had never heard before, and Steve’s just a fun guy to talk to regardless of topic, so hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I did.

Next week, we’ll be recording our third guest, Dave Shea, on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 17th (a week from today!). In addition to being a pretty darned fantastic designer, Dave is of course the mastermind behind the groundbreaking CSS Zen Garden. We’ll spend our time talking about that and other products of Dave’s brilliance, like CSS Sprites and Chalkwork Icons, as well as find out what he’s been doing of late. Jen and I hope you’ll join us!

Last Thursday was the first episode of The Web Behind, which was also episode #35 of The Web Ahead, and I couldn’t really have been much happier with it. John Allsopp made it brilliant by being brilliant, as always. To spend 80 minutes talking with someone with so much experience and insight will always be an act of pure joy. and we were beyond thrilled that he used the occasion to announce his Web History Timeline Project—a web-based timline which anyone can enrich by easily adding milestones.

The episode is up on 5by5, where there are a whole bunch of links to things that came up in the conversation; as well as on iTunes—so pick your favorite channel and listen away! If you are an iTunes listener, Jen and I would be deeply grateful if you could give the show a quick review and rating, but please don’t feel that you’re somehow obligated to do so in order to listen! We’ll be more than happy if people simply find all this as interesting as we do, and happier still if you find the shows interesting enough to subscribe via RSS or iTunes.

Guests are lining up for the next few shows, which will come about once every other week. Jen is preparing a standalone web site where we’ll be able to talk about new and upcoming episodes, have a show archive, provide show information and wiki pages, and much more. Great stories and perspectives are being uncovered. Exciting times!